I'm assuming LG has fixed their bootloop problems since the G4
Apparently LG G7 can be had for ~650 CAD
The new Xperia (XZ3) doesn't have 3.5mm
Ditto for Moto
LG seems to have kept it.
Samsung ticks all the boxes for me but it's relatively pricey.
I refuse to use Chinese phones now, after having to deal with Xiaomi (not too bad with global firmware), Vivo (ewwwwww) and Huawei (blech) firmware quirks. Worse than even old Touchwiz.
Well, refuse to use them as primary. As a secondary/backup/cheapie, they could still work. Just ... not Vivo. No. Just no.
But of the budget-ish flagship phones I'd probably go LG/Sony most of the time.
Zenfone is probably alright but it's also apparently not cheaper (pricier if anything) so there'd be no advantage IMO. But if you're familiar with Asus phones that can be a big plus.
@CanadianLuke @FMLCat is more familiar with them but I had a Xperia X Performance as a secondary for a while and it's decent. But I mostly used it as work phone (modem + 2FA + emails). That was in the weird period when they were kinda-flagships. The more recent Xperia Z3 has dropped the 3.5mm port though.
I had a G2, lasted a while, but after the first two years, it slowed right down. Gave it to my dad after year three, he used it for 2 years, then gave it to a friend in the Philipines
Hmm. Looks like AMD just hasn't designed the cooler on the Radeon VII very well.
Or just crappy manufacturing.
Apparently, the cold plate (the part of the heat sink that makes contact with the GPU itself) can be concave, resulting in bad contact and poor cooling performance.
Read on for some caveats (the OP was testing with with fans at max speed) but even so, a defect of this nature in the heat sink is going to seriously degrade cooling performance.
@avazula Eh, nah, it's just that I've cancelled it so it'll be gone at the end of the month, but I've already migrated + wiped it so there's nothing I want to do on it anymore. Just feels like a waste to have it sitting there.
Yeah. I have an external optical drive on hand but I see little use for it these days. The only reason I might need it is to burn Windows 10 install discs or to reinstall Windows.
The only real problem at this point is the processor. It's 2C/4T and I'm not sure I can find a configuration of a budget laptop like this (aimed at students) with a faster processor like the Ryzen 5 2400U.
So even if you upgraded the other parts, you're going to be stuck with a processor that may not be as fast as one might like it to be.
Well... tried zram on this netbook. It is far slower than just using the USB 3.0 SSD for swap even with the zram space (256MB) well under 50% utilization, most likely because of the slow processor.
The KDE desktop pretty much stopped responding and I had to hit Ctrl+Alt+F1 and log in as root to enable the dedicated swap disk.
root@bifrons:~ # zramctl
NAME ALGORITHM DISKSIZE DATA COMPR TOTAL STREAMS MOUNTPOINT
/dev/zram0 lzo 256M 224.1M 65.1M 68.1M 2 [SWAP]
The virtual memory compression on Windows 10 doesn't suffer from this problem.
(but requires a paging file to be present; it will not work if you have no paging files)
Bleh. Disabled the swap on the zram device, reset it (echo 1 > /sys/block/zram0/reset), and removed the module from the kernel.
Although there's a pretty significant battery life penalty to using this external SSD (it's an older Plextor model with high load power consumption), it's far faster than using zram.
@bwDraco Of course not, because the commit guarantee cannot work without reserved space, and if you must reserve space in RAM (for lack of other options, e.g. a pagefile) then there's no point in compressing anything in RAM (since you cannot guarantee there will be enough space if everything that was compressed is now needed).
The alternative is you break the commit guarantee and allow overcommit, and then either randomly kill processes, or have processes randomly die.
There's only 256 MB of swap actually available and the system actually ran out of memory. The zram device was in fact fully utilized, albeit using only 68 MB of physical memory.
Got confused for a bit.
Perhaps I should try again, this time using 1 GB?
Trying it now. Disabling the external swap device.
